Modern businesses have no choice but to adopt new technologies faster than ever. If a company stands pat, it risks losing out to the competition that is working with architectures, software, and methodologies that far outperform more traditional routes.
For instance, enterprise-level businesses would have a hard time competing without making use of containers, cloud-native platforms, or progressive web apps. That is because traditional, monolithic apps simply aren’t scalable or versatile enough to meet the ebb and flow of demand.
The same thing holds true with serverless.
Serverless platforms offer a lot of advantages over traditional data centers.
But why is serverless a better option for you in 2023 and onward? Besides the obvious reasons—server management being a thing of the past and cost reduction—why should a company switch? Let’s take a look at some of the reasons you might not have thought of, each of which could have dramatic benefits for your company.
Functions as a Service
You might not be familiar with Functions as a Service (FaaS). Essentially, FaaS is a part of cloud computing (and, by transitive association, serverless) that provides a platform for developers to create, run, and manage application functionalities without having to worry about first building and managing the infrastructure, usually associated with deploying an app or service.
FaaS can be thought of in the same vein as libraries and frameworks in that your developers don’t have to worry so much about building everything from scratch. Instead, they have pre-built portions of the stack already available. This has the effect of not only simplifying projects but also making them more reliable, easier to replicate, and cheaper to build.
Who doesn’t want that?
Some of the more popular FaaS solutions include:
- IBM Cloud Functions
- Amazon’s AWS Lambda
- Google Cloud Functions
- Microsoft Azure Functions
- OpenFaaS
Any one of the above options would serve your company well. Given the reliability and speed of the above options, each of these FaaS offerings will help to not only speed up your software deployment cycle but also ensure that it is as reliable as possible.
Unmatched Scalability
If you’re currently depending on a traditional data center, what do you do when it comes time to scale? If you designed your data center to handle considerable growth, you might not have much trouble. However, if your data center was created to meet the needs of your company when it was built, chances are pretty good that scalability is limited. To meet ever-increasing demand, you’d probably have to purchase more hardware—be that servers, RAM, faster CPUs, or costly GPUs.
That can be an expensive proposition for any company, especially if demand is increasing exponentially.
With serverless, you don’t have to worry about adding expensive hardware to cover rising demand. Of course, it’s not just an initial expense you’d have to deal with. There’s also the time required to deploy and configure the hardware to work with your current landscape. That can get complicated. And what happens if the developers/designers who originally built your data center are no longer on your payroll? All of a sudden, that task becomes considerably more challenging.
Scalability isn’t a problem with serverless. And given that companies like AWS and Google are equipped to meet just about any size demand or growth, you can be certain those platforms will be able to meet your scalability demands, no matter how large they get.
Sure, you’ll have to pay more as you use more, but that cost will still be cheaper than purchasing, deploying, and maintaining a data center full of servers.
Faster Deployments
Serverless makes deployments much faster. Instead of having to upload all of your code to a server or worry about backend configurations, developers can instead upload smaller pieces of code to iterate an application. This method makes it considerably easier to patch, update, add new features, or fix problems for an application or service. And with FaaS also at play, developers are able to upload, patch, or fix one function at a time.
Or, developers can upload an entire application at once.
The important thing is your developers will have a choice.
Because your developers can focus their development on a per-function, short-lived, stateless methodology, deployments are exponentially faster.
Simplified Container Management
One of the biggest challenges your developers and operations teams will encounter is deploying and managing the Kubernetes container orchestration platform. Anyone who’s ever had to do this will tell you just how challenging it can be.
Many serverless platforms simplify this process. The likes of AWS and Google have web-based GUIs that make it very easy to deploy a Kubernetes cluster, thereby vastly simplifying the process. Those clusters can be deployed and destroyed at will, which makes going serverless for containers even more attractive.
The truth is, that deploying and managing a Kubernetes cluster can be a full-time job in and of itself. That means you’ll have to dedicate a portion of your DevOps team to that task alone.
Instead, go serverless and you remove a sizable barrier to entry for container deployment and management.
Built-in Cloud-Native
Finally, there’s the aspect of cloud-native. Few businesses (especially enterprise-level) can escape cloud-native, as it has become a necessity for so many aspects of business. It’s not just about Google Drive, Dropbox, or iCloud.
Cloud-native is all about microservices. In that respect, it’s very closely related to containers, which (as you know) have become crucial to modern businesses looking to meet the ebb and flow of demand.
Cloud-native computing is a software development process that works with cloud computing for the building and deploying of scalable applications. With cloud-native development, your teams can work with public, private, or hybrid clouds, giving them far more flexibility than they would have otherwise enjoyed.
Cloud-native can increase the efficiency of your software development lifecycle, reduce the costs of your deployments, and ensure the availability of your applications and services. On top of that, if your company has any hopes of pivoting to an agile methodology, cloud-native will be a requirement.
Companies Using Serverless
It should come as no surprise that a number of large companies are using serverless as their platform of choice. Consider the following shortlist of companies:
- Netflix
- Coca-Cola
- T-Mobile
- iRobot
- BBC
- Codepen
- Zalora
- Nordstrom
- Mindmup
- Shamrock
- Sqquid
- Figma
Clearly, if serverless is good enough for these companies, it should be good enough for your company.
Conclusion
Serverless is here to stay, and any enterprise company would be hard-pressed to find a reason to not migrate to the data center of the new world order. With plenty of options available for a serverless host, you should be able to find a platform that perfectly fits your needs, budget, and in-house talent.
